Postcard Helicopters

Yes, I know I’m late for my Day 90 Update. Things got a little hectic there at the end. To answer what must be the most important question, I didn’t do half-bad once the Challenge came to a close.

I imagine it became apparent toward the end that I was losing heart and also losing steam. On the one hand, I was disappointed to have only seven songs to show for three whole months of songwriting, but on the other I was telling myself that at least it was an improvement over last year when I didn’t post a single damned thing.

I think there was an element of “Push me? Fuck you!” going on inside, where I actively resisted writing songs, and not with just a demurred, “no thanks” but with a definite coarsely-stated pushback against the sense of being bossed around. I’m not sure I have a cure for that, at this point.

By the time 17 September rolled around, I had stopped writing music completely. That’s the last date that shows up in my project files list. There were several unfinished pieces tucked away, going all the way back to 4 July, but I had stopped working on them. Some felt closer to being finished than others. Some were merely drum patterns or recordings of guitar riffs. And some were just experiments in sound (“Hello, Typewriter Room!”) that didn’t yield the desired results. It became easier and easier to come up with excuses for not working on songs. It was a pretty picture to take, lemme tell you.

Finally, the countdown clock was in the single digits. Nine hours left. Eight hours left. Seven hours left.

It was at this point I decided to give it one last shot. The previous day I’d collected, into a single folder, the rendered versions of all the projects I’d begun but had yet to finish or otherwise add to my list of posted songs. With seven hours left, I listened to all of them and picked those I felt were “good enough” to stand as unfinished demos – songs which held enough flavor of what the finished piece might sound like that I wouldn’t feel like a total noob for posting them.

I was expecting to get three, maybe four songs. I ended up with eight.

Hey! Not bad! “They may yet be of some use to us…”

I opted to brew up some coffee to help me through this home-stretch sprint, but first I opened up Reaper on the music computer so it would be ready and waiting. Making coffee is such an automatic task that my mind began to wander. Words popped into my head. I was smart enough to write them down and sleep-deprived enough to not censor them. That’s not to say I didn’t work on them – I did – I pushed the words around a bit to see if I could get something nice-sounding out of them, but doing this without making a judgement on whether it was a good or a bad song.

And that seemed to be all the momentum I needed. Well, that and a specific goal. When I added the orphan audio tracks to my 50/90 profile page they took me from seven to fifteen songs. That put me ten songs shy of the halfway mark. Could I really reach that point? The decision came so automatically I didn’t experience it as a conscious one; instead, I knew without-knowing that if I were to reach that goal, it would have to be by writing only lyrics. For some reason, this focused all my attention and energies into doing something I had been longing to do, yet had also thrown up such tremendous barriers against doing, that I was sure I would never surmount them. But what pleased and surprised me more than I expected, was how much fun I had writing all these lyrics in such a short amount of time.

Part of the trick was to dare myself to write the worst lyrics possible. Try to see just how low I could go. That became one of my songs. It was my permission song and it allowed me the luxury of failing badly, to challenge and push me to intentionally fail and, on that night, it actually worked. Song lyrics rolled out, one after the other in the time left remaining. It was speed-writing. It was stream-of-consciousness. But it was also a kind of non-judgemental revision that let me refine the lyrics to some extent but without becoming bound up in knots over them. As if the guiding principles were “getting it done” and “good enough is better than perfect.” It’s a subtle distinction I’m trying to articulate, to say that I put the words on the screen and then played with them for a while but somehow avoided that cramping brick wall of censorship that brings everything to a halt.

I suppose anyone who has been through this experience knows something about what I’m doing such a lousy job of articulating. You could probably call it a Peak Experience in creativity; of a period of going with the Flow, and perhaps something that shouldn’t be examined too closely. Just simply say, “thank you!” and move on. But understanding how this works and figuring out a way to describe it and tap into it more willfully is a pursuit I’m invested in.

As a result of this, I managed to write lyrics for ten more songs, and in that way, I was able to post Twenty-Five Songs to this year’s 50/90 Challenge, and to do so with a whole hour remaining.

Wow.

Jumping from seven to twenty-five songs in six hours. Ten completely new songs and eight compositions that I’d previously judged too harshly as being “not good enough.” There are lessons for me in this and I’d like to think I was smart enough for them to sink in quickly, but I know myself a little better than to expect that.

It does seem clear, however, that deadlines can motivate me more in the short-term than they can over longer periods of time. I don’t find that quality completely appealing. I would prefer a more steady pace, simply because I expect that it would be more sustainable in the long run. It’s nice to know I can still sprint from time to time, but I guess I would rather be fit enough to complete a marathon, as well.

Since this post has rambled on far longer than I expected, I’ll save the actual posting of the songs for a later entry.